State guide

Kansas Nature Guide

Kansas is a great-plains state defined by grass and wind, where the tallgrass prairie of the eastern Flint Hills gives way to mixedgrass and then the short-grass, semi-arid high plains of the west. Its nature calendar is shaped by two hemispheric spectacles — the spring and fall shorebird migration that funnels hundreds of thousands of birds through Cheyenne Bottoms and Quivira, and the dawn booming of prairie-chickens on the Flint Hills leks. From sunflower fields and cottonwood-lined creeks to the dark skies of the Cimarron National Grassland, this is a landscape of open horizons.